I began participating on Discord group ‘The Portal’ on February 18, 2020. This is a discussion board about Eric Weinstein’s podcast. Here are my initial posts. My text is in regular font. Other users are in italic font. I noted in bold the responses from others that I consider standard playbook responses from the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (D.I.S.C) of physics and cosmology. This post is largely a recapitulation on NPQG that consolidates highlights from other posts on my blog.
Introduction
Hi everyone. My name is Mark. I’ve been working on imagining a theory of everything that starts with two fundamental point charge types. I say imagining, because the D.I.S.C. of physics and cosmology can get very strident about outsiders playing in their sandbox and not following their rules. Of course I respect the scientific method, but I’m starting at 10^-35 Planck scale and current instrumentation / experimentation is around 10^-19 at best. So some of the things I imagine are not testable at this point. Nevertheless, it sure seems to me that my ideas are sound and that they solve the paradoxes and open problems in physics and cosmology (but of course it would, so I understand respectful skepticism). You are welcome to look at my blog at jmarkmorris.com where you will find a lot of relatively short blog posts that describe my thinking, all organized in a table of contents on that landing page. You will need to suspend disbelief for a while, because I turn the current nonsense narratives of physics and cosmology on their head, but really it is just a transformation into a much more sensible narrative, IMO. For example, take the one-time inflationary Big Bang, and Penrose’s serial bang/shrink chart and instead imagine a parallel process where supermassive black holes occasionally jet Planck plasma from their poles. Isotropy now occurs because it is the same physics in every SMBH. This seems a lot more logical to me. And if you want to get all mathematical and say nothing but Hawking radiation escapes an event horizon, well then I’d remind you that Einstein’s general relativity has no known physical natural implementation. And I would then say that I’d imagine that a spinning SMBH with a Planck core could very well redefine the event horizon geometry and jet from the poles.
Portal #20 with Sir Roger Penrose:
@43:00 in the audio podcast, Eric describes general relativity in terms of the Penrose Stairs. I found that very interesting. In my work on NeoClassical Physics and Quantum Gravity, I imagine spacetime as an æther made of physical particles, a set of six spinning electrino/positrino dipoles, that follow a wave equation that traces a quasi-spherical shell. The stairs that Eric mentions would then map to the discrete energy quanta of the particle shell (but there are also continuous ephemeral energy waves too). As the spacetime æther particle gains energy (temperature) the electrinos and positrinos spin faster and the shell radius shrinks. This is a Lorentzian relationship so as to implement GR space contraction and time dilation. So time is then related to the speed of the electrinos and positrinos in these shells. I also model these shells around the standard model particles, where the fermions would have a shell surrounding an electrino/positrino payload (nucleus)]. The shell energy is related to containment of the payload. A moving particle would need more energy in the shell to maintain the nucleus. Thus the energy-momentum relation. Long story short, mass is related to shell energy. Since all particles in the universe would have neighbor particles with shells, the electrinos and positrinos in the shell would respond to the electromagnetic fields from those same particles in neighboring shells but it would only be a very small ephemeral energy wave that would propagate spherically. If you are following, this means that all spacetime particles would be accumulator memory for this pulsing shell energy, and the gradient of the energy of the shells is the source of gravity which you could also think of as convection. Anyway, it’s too long to explain more in a paragraph, but if you are interesting in my imaginings, check out jmarkmorris.com.
Hi @jmarkmorris. I have a few questions about your theory. – I’ve noticed on your website that you posit that space is a flat Euclidean manifold. How does a solution like this deal with direct detection of gravitational lensing and gravitational waves? – Do you have a Lagrangian or anything that would resemble a field-theoretic model written down for this hypothesis? I know your website says you don’t have much mathematical description put down, but I’d imagine you probably have at least what you think the form of the Lagrangian is. – Your website says your model posits a physical spacetime aether. In your model, why would this æther not have been detected by Michelson-Morley and subsequent interferometry experiments? Thanks very much.
Hi. The flat Euclidean is simply the truly empty volume of space. It is filled with particles of spacetime, which in my model are real particles, that are composites of the two fundamental particle types. So the empty void is filled with a spacetime æther of these spacetime particles. The spacetime æther particles can have energy and the energy of spacetime æther determines permittivity and permeability of the gas. So that means c varies according to local dense matter-energy. So that covers lensing – it is refraction through the spacetime æther. Gravitational waves would be the interaction of the electrino/positrino shells of all particles. The massive particles have high energy shells which are going to have more influence on nearby spacetime particle shells. So imagine the electrinos and positrinos whipping around the shell and they will influence the neighbor shells electromagnetically. This will be an alternating wave that speeds up or slows down the particles in the other shells (everything according to 1/r^2). So there is no net energy transferred long term from each radiating shell, but there is an RMS outstanding. Those gravitational waves propagate at local c as well. Now think about Mach’s principle – every spacetime particle in the universe is going to be an accumulator for all arriving waves, which are implemented in the energy of nearby shells for the most part because of course 1/r^2. [Aside: there is an exception to Mach’s principle we can talk about later]. I’m not sure if I clearly described it, but every particle has a shell and those shells interact according to Maxwell in a continuous (not quantized) manner that energizes (heats) the shells which causes them to shrink with more energy (Lorentz factor). [Of course you can also have quantized energy transfer between shells, but that’s more about reactions, which we can also talk about later]. The gradient of shell temperature leads to gravity (convection).
Now that all said, when you have a really high energy event like a BH-BH merger the gradient in shell temperatures is going to be enormous and of course there will be reactions galore. That would lead to the huge gradient waves in spacetime particle energy that LIGO would observe here on Earth after of course they have dissipated quite a bit to be just a tiny ripple. I would imagine the physics of the spacetime particles and standard model matter-energy particles in a collision would be a chaotic dynamical system (if I am using those terms correctly). I haven’t yet figured out if there is a spacetime particle flow (or wind?) other than that which would be caused by rapid shrinking of spacetime particles during heating, and growing during cooling. Maybe that flow is also part of high energy collisions. I don’t have the background to formulate Lagrangians.
Michelson-Morley would not have detected spacetime æther because it is so lightly interacting. Thank you for engaging.
Hi @jmarkmorris There’s not really anything inconsistent with General Relativity per se with saying that spacetime with a 0 stress-energy tensor is flat (the cosmological constant is an empirical observation that came after the introduction of GR). I don’t see any real reason I have to accept this flat spacetime version when the predictive power of General Relativity is so astronomically good. Your solution to gravitational lensing also appears to be very similar to Rayleigh scattering, but the math behind a solution like what you’re positing doesn’t seem to have the ability to explain the achromatic nature of gravitational lensing or distortionary effects like Einstein rings. There also are other flaws: if photons were interacting with these new particles electromagnetically, we would be able to see the gas of particles somewhere in the electromagnetic spectrum. On your second paragraph: can you define for me what exactly you mean by a “shell” here? This all seems quite vague. It also doesn’t make sense that you’re saying that this is coming from interactions according to Maxwell’s equations. While Maxwell’s equations are still obviously pertinent, they are unable to explain anything to do with gravitational waves as gravitational waves are emitted by large-scale electrically neutral bodies as well as charged bodies. What do you mean “reactions galore” here? Can you maybe draw me a Feynman diagram of these reactions so I can get a better understanding of what you’re talking about and make sure they are consistent with what I already know?
It’s also not clear to me how something can be “non-interacting” and also slowing down the photon. If it affects the photon in any way, it is by definition interacting. What tensions is this going to resolve? This is also unclear. Based on everything you’ve said before these particles seem very clearly to be interacting with matter/light and would therefore be detectable by Michelson-Morley and so have already been falsified. While I have no doubt that it makes sense to you, I think your lack of formal training will be an extreme handicap to you (even though on your website you posit it as a strength). The incompatibility between quantum field theory and general relativity are by their very nature mathematical. You refusing to engage with the math and not seeming to know what has been empirically ruled out makes it basically impossible for you to even understand what the tensions are, let alone find a solution to them. I don’t mean any disrespect here because your eagerness is admirable, but I think that if you want to continue down this road you are going to need to get formal training in physics and a good understanding of the math of QFT and GR.
Your responses so far are straight from the standard D.I.S.C. playbook of physics, although you have remained civil. I’m here to share my ideas and possibly find collaborators. Let me try to explain my approach. I am working on envisioning a (hopefully) plausible classical implementation of nature and the universe starting at the Planck scale (10^-35) with the following ingredients in the recipe for nature: 1) a background 3D Euclidean void (infinite), 2) ample pairs of point charges, the electrino (-1/6 charge) and the positrino (+1/6 charge), 3) energy carried by electrinos and positrinos in electromagnetic and kinetic form. The physics these ingredients follow are defined by Maxwell’s equations and classical mechanics. That’s it. My set of ideas, which I call ‘NeoClassical Physics and Quantum Gravity’ (NPQG) is a complete self-consistent narrative of nature. It does not require nonsense like a one time inflationary Big Bang, nor singularities, nor wormholes, nor many worlds, and certainly no gods, no mythologies, and no woo. It’s a very simple narrative that emerges. It rearranges the GR-QM narrative but does not disturb experimental results or accepted math that describes things at the scale of 10^-19 or higher, which is the current leading edge of physics. Here are the basic ideas: 1. All particles are based upon an exterior neutral shell which may contain a payload or nucleus. Since everything is built with electrinos and positrinos, the shell is formed with electrino/positrino pairs (dipoles). The nucleus is also made with electrinos and positrinos. So far, I have posited shell formulas of 3/3, 6/6, and 12/12. For now I simply think of these shells as the particles traveling along the surface of an imaginary sphere of radius r. I call the path and velocity of the shell particles the wave equation of the shell. The radius r is determined by the energy in the shell in opposition to the charge and energy in the payload. The radius r of the shell implements the Lorentz factor that appears in GR mathematics.
2. One type of particle implements spacetime. I think it is the 12/12 shell. So Einstein’s spacetime, which is an abstract, curvy, and geometrical is implemented by an æther of 12/12 shells. It is so lightly interacting that Michelson-Morley would not detect it, but depending on what scale you consider, the interaction of spacetime æther with matter-energy particles is very significant. Spacetime æther is what implements gravity. The energy of the spacetime æther plays important roles. a) as spacetime æther is heated, the radius r of the shell shrinks – this is how Einstein’s curvy spacetime is implemented. So you get to keep the curviness and Einstein’s GR math within it’s scales of applicability (GR breaks down at the singularity, but I’ll explain that). b) as the temperature of spacetime æther increases, each particle moves closer to the ultimate energy limit, the Planck energy. This causes the permittivity and permeability of spacetime æther to increase. Therefore the speed of a photon, c, is not a constant, but rather varies according to c=1/sqrt(permittivity x permeability). This causes photons to experience refraction in hot spacetime, which is how lensing is implemented. The contraction of hot spacetime particles may also play a role. Time is implemented by the speed of electrinos and positrinos in particle shells. The faster the electrinos and positrinos in the shell, the slower the time experienced by that particle. Ok, so now we have a spacetime æther particle which permeates the universe and implements GR.
3. Standard model fermions are also implemented with shells. Here is my current decoding, but more work is required on this, so consider it tentative. A photon is a 6/6 shell (6 electrinos/6 positrinos). An electron is a 3/3 shell surrounding a 6/0 payload. Let’s use the notation 3/3[6/0]. Since electrinos have a -1/6 charge, this works out to -1 charge for an electron as expected.
4. A proton is 6/6[0/6] or a photon shell surrounding a positron. An electron neutrino is a 3/3 shell, but it is a majorana particle so the electron anti-neutrino is also a 3/3 shell and they are probably differentiated somehow. A neutron is a 6/6[3/3] or a photon shell surrounding an anti-neutrino. Did you notice anything? The baryon asymmetry problem just went away. What we call anti-matter is the payload of protons and neutrons. While I realize NPQG is an imagined implementation of nature, almost all major paradoxes and open problems in physics and cosmology will have simple logical explanations, just like the missing anti-matter problem.
5. So we’ve covered the stable particles: photon, electron, neutron, proton, and spacetime æther particle. You can also derive the compositions of all the other exotic particles seen in the colliders. It’s not hard to decipher them. I plan to write a Python program to go through all the combinations and try to validate the decoding vs. the standard model and hopefully the PDG.
6. You’ll notice a vague correspondence of the shell formulas 3/3, 6/6, 12/12 with spins of 1/2, 1, and 2. I think this is not a coincidence, but I haven’t worked out the exact relation yet.
7. Ok, let’s move on to dispensing with a one-time inflationary Big Bang and ΛCDM. Did you know that Dr. Natarajan working with Dr. Rees modeled supermassive black holes as ΛCDM black holes? Rather than setting ΛCDM aside when they realized SMBH were at the core of most galaxies, they actually shoehorned the most powerful objects in the universe into ΛCDM. You can listen to Dr. Natarajan on the recent episode of Dr. Strogatz’s podcast, ‘The Joy of X’. I wrote about it here: https://johnmarkmorris.com/2020/02/07/the-joy-of-x-priya-natarajan/
In NPQG, I imagine that since everything is made of electrinos and positrinos, that there is really not that much magic about black holes, they are simply like every other celestial object in that the concentration of matter energy rises dramatically towards the core. Well, we know from Planck that there is nothing more energetic than a point charge (an electrino or positrino) carrying the Planck energy. If you take this to the extreme, and under sufficient conditions, the core of a SMBH would be Planck scale point charges. Not a singularity. A different phase of matter-energy. I imagine the Planck core as a static lattice of electrinos and positrinos (possibly with faults). If you spend some time thinking about it, you would realize a couple of things about Planck cores. 1) information is destroyed, 2) there is only one microstate, 3) entropy is zero, 4) the matter-energy INSIDE the core can not participate in gravity (every particle is maxed out on energy so no way to transmit). Those are some really huge realizations that solve more open paradoxes and problems.
8) I further imagine that a Planck core can breach the event horizon under certain conditions, like high spin, or collision. Let’s take the case of a spinning SMBH. I think it would take on an oblate shape and the layers at the poles would be thinnest. Breaches would occur at the poles of the SMBH. From those breaches would emerge jets of Planck plasma that would pierce right through spacetime æther and extend for scores of light years. As the Planck plasma cooled it would be a roiling set of reactions that pretty much looks like the standard Big Bang picture and timeline. As particles with shells emerged, they would inflate as they cooled (refer back to the radius of the shell being Lorentzian with energy). So now, we have a galaxy local process that occurs throughout the universe and follows the same physics everywhere. Isotropy is thus a natural outcome. We no longer need a one-time inflationary Big Bang. We no longer need to age the universe at 13.8B years. Instead we arrive at a steady-state cosmology with no known beginning. This resolves a number of tensions with ΛCDM and astronomical observations. Lastly, when astronomers observe superluminal jets, they may very well be superluminal because Planck plasma pierces right through spacetime æther, and therefore there is no medium to limit the speed of photons within the jet. No more inventing nonsense about narrow observation angles.
9) The Planck plasma jets eventually cool enough that matter-energy builds up at a terminus of the jet. This is what Arp and the Burbidges likely observed as the formation of proto-galaxies. How long does an SMBH jet? Does the SMBH shrink while jetting (it must, right?). How often does an SMBH jet? These would all be new science to ponder and investigate.
10) You can keep going with this line of thinking and solve almost all paradoxes and open problems with simple logic. New mechanisms to consider for galaxy rotation curves (mass hiding in Planck cores), etc. You can now re-evaluate the need for dark matter. There are new mechanisms for redshift. Expansion becomes far less interesting than flows of spacetime æther. Do black holes gulp down spacetime æther? Can we explain the symmetry issues by considering spacetime æther particles? I’d guess that CP symmetry is maintained. CMB would be the black body radiation of spacetime æther. And so on… every issue falls to this simple logical narrative which is based on a very simple set of ingredients. Lastly, I’ve shown how GR emerges and parts of QM. I think that NPQG is compatible with existing experiment and accepted theory. And I plan to plod away in my collaboration of 1 making more and more linkages. Ok this is getting long and I’ve written all of this and more on my website (jmarkmorris.com). No ads, no paywalls, no sign-ons. Not trying to convince anyone or sell anything. Pure open source development of ideas. Thank you for anyone who read some or all of this. Best, Mark
@jmarkmorris You seem to just be regurgitating what’s on your website at this point and not engaging with my questions. Are you going to answer the criticisms I made on your hypothesis’ internal inconsistencies and incompatibility with existing empirical findings?
Well ‘just be regurgitating’ is not a very civil phrase for a discussion. I am not here to prove anything to you. I am simply sharing my ideas and how I arrived at them. I also am not bound to work within the confines of what I consider to be nonsense narratives and rules of modern physics and cosmology. So that said, let me see what I can say about your questions, some of which I did cover in my 10 point response.
– already responded that you still get curvy spacetime of Einstein and the GR math at scales where it applies, but that I am showing a natural implementation of spacetime as an æther. There is lots of research that might be relevant on superfluids (Khoury, Hossenfelder come to mind), and of course on Bose-Einstein condensates.
– I went through most of the different ways spacetime æther would interact. Lightly for Michelson-Morley, lightly for the effect of spacetime æther galaxy local expansion on photon redshift, lightly to implement mass-energy transmission that heats the gas where the gradient implements gravity as convection.
– I explained the shell and that they are composed of pairs of charged particles (electrinos and positrinos). I think it is straightforward to say they would follow Maxwell’s equations and standard classical mechanics.
– I haven’t studied ‘achromatic nature of gravitational lensing or distortionary effects like Einstein rings’ but I think I gave enough mechanisms that physicists can surely curve fit a solution. Yes that is a criticism of physicists, but it’s also honest—I think a lot of what they have done in the last 45 years is curve-fitting to explain esoteric nonsensical narratives. Again, I am positing the ingredients and bone structure of a narrative. I am a one person collaboration, and I will continue to chip away, but I don’t and won’t have the answer to every detailed question and as a result some areas will be vague. Best, Mark
@jmarkmorris Can you say what your theory predicts that could be tested by experiment and how it could be falsified?
@r1chard5mith Unfortunately on his website the only testable prediction he talks about is actually detecting things at the Planck scale level, which is currently technologically impossible. It’s unfalsifiable in that sense, but based on what he’s said so far it seems to have already been falsified by other tests. We’ll see if he has a different opinion, though.
Testability and falsification are a challenge because I am imaging scales smaller than current technology can probe. I do think that over the next decade the findings of the newer space-based telescopes will raise the ΛCDM narrative tension so high that new models will be sought. I hope NPQG will provide a better narrative fit. One idea I had is that with my conception of gravity being based on the gradient of spacetime æther temperature, that it might be possible to show orthogonal attraction to the spacetime on the line between massive objects. Perhaps that could be an explanation for the filaments between galaxy clusters? I know physicists want to have new predictions that can be tested, but I also place a lot of value in providing a better narrative for existing observations. Another idea is to show how mass hiding in Planck cores in an SMBH could potentially influence galaxy rotation curves. Or likewise how the jet ejecta and reappearance of that mass might have an effect. Resolving a lot of tensions and paradoxes should be considered as some sort of evidence. So, I understand what you are asking for but I haven’t found any simple low cost experiment that would test NPQG or falsify it. If there was some simple test, I presume that effect would have been discovered by now. Best, Mark
Mark, I am not asking you to be “bound to work within the confines of what [you] consider to be nonsense narratives”. The questions I am asking were all either (a) asking you to resolve inconsistencies that are totally internal to your hypothesis or (b) asking you to resolve inconsistencies between your hypothesis and what we already observe about the physical world. I have have not made any criticisms that rely on existing physical models. I am asking you to resolve very specific ways in which your hypothesis appears to already be falsified and you are largely dodging my questions. Your response to my criticism that this hypothesis can’t explain physical observations like Einstein rings or the fact that gravitational lensing leaves the wavelength of light unchanged was to launch into an ad hominem attack on physicists at large. You also did not answer my question about how an implementation of Maxwell’s equations on new particles could explain phenomena of large-scale electrically neutral structures. I’m not sure how you would know that physicists have done “curve-fitting to explain esoteric nonsensical narratives” over the last 45 years when you self-admittedly do not understand the physics they are doing or their models. You have also not told us how this hypothesis resolves any of the very specific and technical incompatibilities between general relativity and quantum field theory. None of what you’ve written has even attempted to address or make reference to the problems you’re saying your hypothesis resolves. It seems to me that we have every cause to reject this hypothesis based on its incompatibility with existing data and lack of explanatory power.
I have not dodged any question. I have been clear on what I envision and what I haven’t. I have also been clear that I am working on a narrative and linkages to GR-QM era science. It is a process and progress is being made as you can see from my blog and the dates of the articles. There is a huge amount of information to consider and this process often requires running out on a limb, seeing if it bears the weight of thought experiment, and running back quickly if it doesn’t. That is not a dodge. That is simply the process. I am doing this ‘open-source,’ not creating in the dark and hoping to reveal a masterpiece decades hence. So yes, there will be errors, inconsistencies, vagueness, and lots I don’t know (yet).
I thought I answered gravitational lensing, but let’s go through it again and see if I am missing something. So, let’s take a spherical black hole, then according to NPQG the spacetime æther temperature would drop with distance from the black hole horizon. I said that temperature of spacetime æther determines the permittivity and permeability of the spacetime æther, and that this then determines local c. So c, will be slow near the event horizon and speed up while moving outward towards cold free spacetime æther. This seems to me to be standard refraction, and I would expect an Einstein ring to emerge partially and wholly if aligned. Also, I did not say that the photon would lose energy as it passes through the various temperature of spacetime æther. Rather it will slow down in hot gas and speed back up in cool gas. Are you imagining a collinear beam of photons of different wavelengths encountering the gradient temperature gas and emerging collinear? How would we differentiate which collinear beams were the sources of photons refracted into our telescopes? If this isn’t satisfactory, please expand your question, i.e., ELI5.
We both agreed that a non-scattering reaction of photons with spacetime æther is unknown (to us). On the other hand, science hasn’t seriously considered spacetime as a gas of classical particles (at least in the last century, as far as I know). I am imagining extremely small harmonics of the photon wave equation very occasionally transferred to a spacetime æther particle, without deflecting the photon. The answer is unknown.
I believe gravitation can only be ascribed to large scale neutral bodies as an aggregation of individual particle interactions. I think I described this already, but I’ll try again. Each shell is responsible for implementing the ‘mass’ of a particle. This means the energy in the shell provides the containment for the payload at rest and the shell energy must increase if the particle is moving relative to spacetime æther to maintain containment. (Thus the energy-momentum relation). Since all standard model particles are in a sea of spacetime æther particles, there is a continuous small scale interaction of the particles of each shell as they transit their wave equations. This small scale interaction might cause a path deviation or speed change in the electrinos and positrinos in nearby shells (1/r^2). As particles in the shells come in to proximity a small amount of continuous (not quantum) energy will flow. For example the particles may slow down as they approach and speed up as they move away. So we would have an exchange of electromagnetic and kinetic energy at this tiny scale of electrinos and positrinos in the shell. There isn’t a net quantum transfer of energy, but rather an alternating ebb and flow. I think that leads to a root-mean-square outstanding energy that is accumulated in neighboring shells (1/r^2). Maybe another way to think of this is that not only does each shell have to contain its payload, but it is also maintaining shell integrity as it interacts with neighbor shells.
Now if you have concentrated standard matter-energy particles, they are all going to be pulsing this mass-energy and this will serve to raise the energy level (temperature) of the local spacetime æther. And so this goes particle to particle providing a physical implementation for gravity and Mach’s principle. Now you add in that the shells change size according to energy (to implement Einstein’s curvy spacetime) and that the ebb and flow travels at local c and you end up with a universe that is a sea of spacetime particles and temperature gradients. This is where convection would come in to play because standard matter-energy particles would need less energy to move in the direction of higher temperature spacetime æther. Admittedly this is all visionary narrative, but it’s based on standard electromagnetics and kinetics. Again the point is to build a plausible narrative and continue to chip away at the science and math. What I have found in two years of doing this is that the overall set of ideas is getting more and more parsimonious.
It’s ok if you don’t agree, or don’t get it, or whatever.
Best, Mark
J Mark Morris : San Diego : California : 2020 – 20xx
Neoclassical Physics and Quantum Gravity 